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  • 2020-04-24 (xsd:date)
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  • Did the Trump Admin Seize COVID-19 Protective Equipment from States? (en)
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  • As the U.S. federal government and states clashed over how to respond to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic in spring 2020, workers on the frontlines of helping virus patients reported widespread shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE), including N95 masks and gowns. Hospital and state leaders described a chaotic and highly competitive market for securing supplies from vendors — disarray that critics of President Donald Trump blamed on his ad-hoc approach to addressing the shortfall. Meanwhile, several news reports surfaced, claiming federal officials seized PPE shipments from local agencies or stopped the deals between vendors and states by offering higher bids. Snopes received numerous inquiries from readers about the validity of the assertion. To get to the root of the claim, we first researched from where the news reports originated. From The New York Times to the Boston Globe to The Intelligencer (a blog within New York magazine), several media outlets highlighted the experience of Dr. Andrew W. Artenstein, an infectious disease physician in Springfield, Massachusetts, who said the pandemic has forced him into PPE supply-chain work. On April 17, 2020, he published a letter in a peer-reviewed medical journal, The New England Journal of Medicine, about his apparent travails of getting a large shipment of face masks and respirators from a warehouse in a mid-Atlantic state. (He told The New York Times he would not publicize the location of the transaction out of fear of jeopardizing his relationship with the supply vendor.) The letter read: It is unclear why federal officials may have targeted the Massachusetts delivery or where they would have allegedly redirected the supplies. Citing a policy of not confirming or denying specific investigations, the FBI declined to comment on Artenstein's account in an April 20 New York Times story, saying only that the agency had been working to ensure that PPE is not being unlawfully distributed or hoarded during the coronavirus pandemic. Additionally, the Boston Globe could not reach the Department of Homeland Security, which encompasses FEMA, to comment on the doctor's story. Though widely circulated online, Artenstein's story was not the only report of federal interference in the procurement of PPE in spring 2020. On April 7, the Los Angeles Times reported health care officials in seven states said the federal government seized their shipments and did not give guidance on how or if the local agencies would someday get the supplies they ordered. Are they stockpiling this stuff? Are they distributing it? We don’t know, one unidentified official told the LA Times. And are we going to ever get any of it back if we need supplies? It would be nice to know these things. Additionally, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti told The New York Times that FEMA stepped in at the last minute of a deal the city had with one of its usual suppliers to buy 1 million masks; a New Jersey county official told local media an order of 35,000 N95 and other masks were commandeered by the federal government; and a leader of the private health care company Kaiser Permanente told staff members that the company had found 20 million masks to purchase, but the feds actually seized that shipment before we were able to acquire it, the Times reported. The same news story said: (en)
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